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Recordings

Following the iconic series of the complete songs of Schubert and Schumann, Graham Johnson’s latest enterprise traverses the complete songs of Brahms. He is joined here on Volume 2 by the wonderful Christine Schäfer, whose contribution to the Schu ...» More

'The performances give unalloyed pleasure. Lott's still-radiant soprano combines beautifully with the vibrant, musky mezzo of Kirchschlanger, while Jo ...'I'll leave you to experience the conjuring for yourself. For conjuring it is: any element of the didactic is totally absent in this seamless garment ...» More

The poetry of Daumer is more often than not influenced by the East—the poetry of Hafiz was an enduring theme for him, quite independently of the more celebrated Hafiz-inspired work of Goethe and Platen. Indeed, Brahms in his group of Op 32 songs unashamedly mingles Daumer with the very much more famous Platen, despite the fact that to this day Daumer’s fame rests largely on what Brahms chose to make of him. The eight songs of Brahms’s Op 57 are all Daumer settings, and five of them are performed on this disc. The tender pleasure of pain, some would call it emotional masochism, is a Daumer speciality, and never more so than in this beautiful song, languid and intense by turns. The melody unfolds on the background of a sensuous barcarolle that has a quality of submissive accommodation—as if ever-ready to waft this way and that to the lover’s will, and happy to receive any crumb from the table that comes his way. The crotchet–quaver alternations of the right hand are superbly appropriate to suggest the movement of a slowly undulating oriental fan—not to make the hot fire of sexual feelings burn brighter, but to assuage them with an occasional smile (the cooling of something uncomfortably hot is a favoured Brahmsian image). The word ‘Geduld’ is repeated, separated by rests, as if to demonstrate the infinite amount of patience on offer from the singer in this one-sided relationship. The bittersweet glow of love, both painful and delicious, is wonderfully caught in the downward sweep of the phrase ‘Was der Liebe wehe tut’, which is sumptuously chromatically inflected. The repeat of these words with which the song ends (apart from a postlude that restates the themes heard at the beginning of the song) suggests the wounded admirer, clinging on to his pain with the smile of one who knows that simply to be in the orbit of the beloved is reward and compensation enough for any emotional discomfort. Sighs of longing are heard throughout the piano part, sometimes flattened into the minor key and sometimes happily in the major. The ambivalence of hopeless love, and the persistent if muted optimism that patience and tenacity may one day bring their own reward, have seldom been better expressed in music.

Once again this is Daumer in a mood of rueful resignation. The dream music drifts from the bottom of the left-hand stave and travels upwards in languid semiquavers, as if it were slowly surfacing from the depths of the unconscious, a metaphor for the act of gradually awakening to the truth of a given situation. This is almost certainly a song connected with the composer’s feelings for Clara Schumann. Eric Sams points to the appearance of her motif—the spelling of her name transcribed into musical tones—in the second bar of the vocal line. The song is divided into two parts: first, the poem is set all the way through, with a particularly bereft repetition of the words ‘Es sei ein Traum’. After a piano interlude similar to the introduction, the poem’s final two-and-a-half lines are repeated, prefaced by the eloquent addition of the word ‘Ach’. A powerful atmosphere is created by this music; the pianist finds something almost impressionistic in those tendrils of sound that glide upwards in the left hand and also in the slow-motion chords—a version of the vocal line augmented and stretched into dotted crotchets—that dominate the right. By the standards of most Brahms songs this is an unusually translucent piece of music. It is also very much in the tradition of Daumer’s favoured masochistic mode—the sensuality, and even enjoyment, of experiencing rejection, and somehow not only learning to accept it, but to savour it as something deserved and inevitable. These are indeed dreams fit for study by the psychotherapists of the future.

I dreamed I was dear to you; But I scarcely needed To awaken; For even in my dreams I felt It was a dream.

With the eight songs of his Opus 57, published in 1871, Brahms set verses by Georg Friedrich Daumer (1800-75), a poet to whom he often turned, for example in the Liebeslieder Waltzes, and (rather like Schubert with Wilhelm Müller) for whom he ensured fame for posterity. Unbewegte laue Luft and Es träumte mir reflect, in strikingly pictorial and individual music, a pervading sensuousness, the yearning brought about by unrequited passion: shadowy moods of emotional pain, and patient hope for the elusive, perhaps illusory, consolation of love.

Music of insubstantial dreaming is followed by urgency and vehemence. The singer pleads with the object of his devotion to turn away that gaze, just as Gustav von Aschenbach in Britten’s Death in Venice both longs for, and fears, the gaze of Tadzio because of the emotions it will arouse: ‘Ah! Don’t smile like that! No one should be smiled at like that!’ The vocal line suggests the paradox of someone both almost imperiously in control (‘Ach, wende diesen Blick’ is both a plea and a forthright command) and helpless (the melisma of the falling phrase of ‘[wende] dies Angesicht!’ is tinged with desperation). When triplets invade the piano-writing in the fifth bar we are left in no doubt that this is a consuming passion that endangers the person who is unfortunate enough to harbour amatory feelings. Torment and fear are expressed by a high-lying vocal line and an accompaniment that suggests hot blood coursing through the veins of the music (as described in verse 2) as well as the writhing of the very snakes that are revealed as part of Daumer’s imagery at the end of the poem. For the middle strophe we move from F minor to D flat major and mention of the soul at rest introduces a religious tone to the proceedings as if the music were being sung in a church, or accompanied by an organ. With the words ‘fieberischer Wilde’ the music breaks out of these rather sanctimonious chains of propriety and achieves a tempestuous climax at ‘In meinen Adern rollt das heisse Blut’. The last page of music (beginning with the line ‘Ein Strahl, ein flüchtiger, von deinem Licht’) is more or less a repeat of the first page. Once again the combination of voice and piano eloquently expresses the paradox of someone who can neither bear to look at someone’s unattainable beauty, nor live without possessing it. In terms of texture and mood this is almost textbook Brahms.

The beloved, unattainable though she may be, is also goodhearted and gentle. Here we have the chance to hear her demeanour expressed in musical terms and in the friendly tonality of E major. The gently rocking undulations of the piano-writing glow with the ‘mildes Licht’ that emanates from her gaze. Thus the first two lines of the poem move gently back and forth in a 6/8 rhythm of happy complacency. The next two lines of poetry demonstrate that the same lover’s glances can also cause disruptive turbulence (the entire theme, after all, of the previous song on this disc, from the same collection of poetry). We realize that something is amiss in the chromatically inflected ascent of ‘Ach, es können auch’ and the strangely restless setting of the word ‘Huldgebärden’ (bars 10–11), where each syllable occasions a shift of chord and harmony. This phrase ends in the dying fall (‘uns fast das Herze bricht’) that brings confirmation of possible heartbreak. The piano music that had begun this song is now inflected into the minor key and we might have expected an entire minore section on the second page; instead, when the voice enters with ‘Was die Liebe sucht, um froh zu werden’ we revert to the E major of the opening. However, this is no straightforward strophic repetition. It is all very well to allocate contented music in E major for a phrase like ‘What love seeks to be happy’, but we soon realize that the beloved described here will provide no such comfort or security. Accordingly the vocal line edges up the stave again, almost semitone by discontented semitone. This admission is followed by a short postlude where the music of the opening returns and the sounds of ‘ein mildes Licht’ reassert themselves. This is music where happiness and unhappiness seem equally gentle and the narrator seems happy enough to be unhappy. It is an ambiguity typical of the Daumer songs.

When playing this song it is difficult for the pianist not to think of Schubert and Der Neugierige from Die schöne Müllerin. The effortless and rippling euphony between the hands (both works are in B major) betokens the helpless adoration for an unattainable beloved that is at the heart of both these songs. It is as if the ghost of the miller boy has helped Brahms to thread the string of pearls, each of these as precious as drops of water in Schubert’s ‘Bächlein meiner Liebe’. Eric Sams finds another Schubertian allusion under the word ‘gereihte’ (bars 6–7)—in fact this is almost a direct quotation from the introduction to the Goethe setting An den Mond D296. From ‘Wie wiegt sie sich so fröhlich’ the voice is supported by an accompaniment that, in its between-the-hands undulations, unmistakably illustrates the idea of cradling. At ‘Auf deiner schönen Brust!’ (the setting emphasizes the possessive pronoun) the necklace is suspended in its rightful place around the beloved’s neck, leading the eye, inevitably, to her décolleté. This investiture at ‘Auf deiner schönen Brust!’ inspires a moment of hushed musical revelation, like the opening of a jewel case for a few stunned onlookers. This phrase, and the repetition of these words in harmonic sequence (when pearly flats, seeming to catch the light, change to glinting sharps) recall the climax of Schubert’s first Suleika (another song in B minor/major), reportedly Brahms’s favourite work in the entire Lieder literature. At ‘Mit Seel’ und Sinn begabet’ music that had seemed chaste on the song’s first page appears in a newly eroticized context, and the necklace has clearly become an object of almost fetishistic delight. With ‘Was müssen wir erst fühlen’ the vocal line and piano (in this case the melody outlined in right-hand descant) entwine in a rapturously intimate colloquy. From now on the music seems to whisper: ‘Lucky necklace to be nestled in such a place!’ The verb ‘anzuschmiegen’ is ideally reflected in an accompaniment that insinuates itself into the stave using any possible harmonic route to burrow deeper into the music’s texture. The concluding words ‘An eine solche Brust!’ are repeated in a swoon of delight while the pianist’s fingers, now tracing their descant theme at the heart of the music (and in a lower, ever more intimate tessitura) seem permitted at last to touch the necklace and perhaps its sacred environs. Or maybe they only do so in the singer’s dreams. The dying fall on the final ‘Brust!’, a suspension that is unique in the Brahms songs, vividly recalls the final ‘Adelaide’ in Beethoven’ s song of that name, where the poet is equally enraptured, indeed almost beside himself, with the object of his affections.

Georg Friedrich Daumer was a prolific poet and translator as well as a teacher, homeopath, anthropologist and educational guru. Brahms set more poems or translations by him than by any other poet, a tally that is explained by the thirty-two Daumer lyrics from his Polydora set in the two sets of Liebeslieder waltzes alone. Apart from these there are no fewer than nineteen solo songs. The poems recorded on this disc come from Hafiz (1852), Frauenbilder und Huldigungen (1853) and that anthology of translations of poetry from around the world, Polydora (1855).

Motionless mild air, Nature deep at rest, Through the still garden night Only the fountain plashes, But my soul swells With a more ardent desire, Life surges in my veins And yearns for life. Should not your breast too Heave with more passionate longing? Should not the cry of my soul Quiver deeply through your own? Softly on ethereal feet Glide to me, do not delay! Come, ah! come, that we might Give each other heavenly satisfaction!

With the eight songs of his Opus 57, published in 1871, Brahms set verses by Georg Friedrich Daumer (1800-75), a poet to whom he often turned, for example in the Liebeslieder Waltzes, and (rather like Schubert with Wilhelm Müller) for whom he ensured fame for posterity. Unbewegte laue Luft and Es träumte mir reflect, in strikingly pictorial and individual music, a pervading sensuousness, the yearning brought about by unrequited passion: shadowy moods of emotional pain, and patient hope for the elusive, perhaps illusory, consolation of love.

Motionless mild air, Nature deep at rest, Through the still garden night Only the fountain plashes, But my soul swells With a more ardent desire, Life surges in my veins And yearns for life. Should not your breast too Heave with more passionate longing? Should not the cry of my soul Quiver deeply through your own? Softly on ethereal feet Glide to me, do not delay! Come, ah! come, that we might Give each other heavenly satisfaction!

Unbewegte laue Luft, like Mozart’s ‘An Chloe’ and Richard Strauss’s ‘Ständchen’, culminates in music of undisguised sexual fulfilment. The very first phrase introduces the chromaticism that lends an erotic charge to the song. The stillness is broken by right hand trills that depict the splashing of a fountain; then, with a change of tempo, agitated broken chords in the accompaniment and rising vocal phrases, the music begins to express the ardour of the poet’s words.